Memoirs of Life and Literature Part 14

The content and significance of such a feeling are presented in concrete form by such inst.i.tutions as authors' or writers' clubs. In London and in other capitals so many of these have been established, and continue to flourish, that they obviously perform certain useful and welcome functions; but my own criticism would be that to call them clubs for "authors" or "writers" is a misnomer which fails to particularize the real basis of members.h.i.+p. In the modern world, no doubt, all writers, merely as writers, have certain interests in common. They have, in the first place, to get their works published, and the business of publication is a very complex process, which has necessarily a legal and financial side. Questions are inevitably involved of financial loss or gain, and even writers who are indifferent to profit, and are ready to bear a loss, will desire to be treated fairly. They may be ready to bear a loss, but not a loss which is inequitable, and if any gain should ensue, they will desire an equitable share of it. In connection with such matters, authors' clubs may perform many useful offices for their members. In so far, however, as their functions are limited to offices such as these the proper name for them would be not clubs, but agencies.

On the other hand, in the modern world authors.h.i.+p to a great extent is a systematic writing for journals. It has to be performed, in respect both of time and other conditions, in accordance with strict arrangements between the writers themselves and the officials by whom, whether as editors or owners, these journals are managed. For this reason persons who practice journalism--daily journalism in particular--will probably be persons more or less similar in their habits, and clubs for admission to which the main qualification consists in the fact of authors.h.i.+p may provide them with special conveniences which they one and all desire.

But for persons whose literary pursuits are carried on in isolation, and who aim at expressing by authors.h.i.+p no thoughts or no sentiments but their own, it seems to me that a club for authors or writers as such represents a conception as wrong as would that of a club for speakers as such or for politicians as such. What bond of union would there be between a Tory and a ferocious Democrat if they neither of them put pen to paper--if they were not authors at all? They would keep, so far as was possible, to different sides of the street. Why, then, should they wish to meet in a club coffee room and lunch at adjacent tables, simply because each, besides holding opinions absolutely odious to the other, should, instead of keeping them to himself, endeavor to disseminate them by writing among as many of his fellow creatures as was possible?

It may be said that two such men might very well wish to do so because, though what each expressed was odious to the other in itself, each was a consummate master of literary art in expressing it, and each admired, and was aware of, the presence of this technical mastery in the other.

Now, so far as it goes, this, in numerous cases, may be true. Indeed, such an admission is the very point from which the present argument started. Pure literature, as such, is, no doubt, susceptible of consummate beauties, in their natural admiration of which men who are otherwise the bitterest adversaries may agree. What does this admission cover? It applies, in my own opinion, to minor literature only, though masterpieces of minor literature may be in their own way supreme, as Keats has shown us in such poems as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but, as applied to literature in its higher and greater forms, the admission fails to be true, because it fails to be adequate. A poem by Keats may be admirable so far as it goes, but really great literature, such as Goethe's "Faust," for example, would possess but a minor value unless there were at the back of it something that is more than literature. In the case of a poem like "Endymion" the poem is greater than the man who writes it. In the case of a poem like "Faust" the man is greater than the poem. Behind the poet stands the man of profound reflection, the man of the world, the philosopher, the pa.s.sionate or disillusioned lover. He is all of these before he is a literary artist. His writing is only the vehicle by which he communicates what he is in all these capacities to others, and so leaves a practical impression on the thoughts and emotions of the world.

And what is true of verse is more obviously true of prose. Of all prose works which have captured attention by their mere merits as literature, no better example can be given than the great masterpiece of Gibbon. But though Gibbon may be read by many for the sake of his mere literary charm, his place in the world as a great writer depends but in a secondary way on this charm in itself. He lives because this charm was used by him to convey the results of research so penetrating and comprehensive, and guided by a mind so sagacious and powerful, that for the most part these results have stood the test of criticism, however keen and hostile; and in accomplis.h.i.+ng this feat Gibbon has rendered a service which is still indispensable to the historical students and historical thinkers of to-day, whereas otherwise his merely literary merits would have been merits displayed in vain or relegated to a literary museum which few men cared to enter.

This conception of pure literature as written language which is mainly appreciated for its own sake, and is for that reason in a relative sense trivial, no doubt widens out again when we come to consider the fact that emotion of some kind is, in the last resort, the one thing which gives value to life. But the fact remains that all the desirable emotions are determined by things which are not in themselves emotions, such as knowledge, intellectual beliefs, and the laws, economic and otherwise, which alone render a civilized society possible; and even the greatest of merely literary charms make great literature only in so far as they endow mankind with fundamental things like these.

Throughout these memoirs there has been constant allusion to the relation borne by literary expression to life in the case of the author himself. I have said already that for mere literature as such, and for its pract.i.tioners, I have from my youth onward had a certain feeling of contempt, and I now may explain once more what, at least in my own case, such a feeling really means. It means, not that mere literature at its best is not beautiful and delightful, but that it must, in order to be worthy of a serious man's devotion, be a mere part of some whole, the other part of which is incomparably the larger of the two. It means that literature, in order to be great literature, must at the same time be practically a form of action. I have no ambition to impose this opinion on others. I would merely record it as an opinion on which, since the ending of my early days at Oxford, I have myself by instinct acted.

Whatever I have written I have written with one or other ulterior object, to which the mere pleasure of literary opposition as such has been altogether subordinate. Of the nature of these objects I have said enough already, but I may once again define them.

One of them relates to religion, to the quality of the lives and the loves of ordinary men and women as affected by it, and also to metaphysics and science, in so far as they leave, or do not leave, the doctrines of religion credible.

The second of these objects relates to the existing conditions of social and industrial life, more especially to those suggested by the loosely used word "Labor," and the frantic fallacies with regard to these by which the ideas of extreme reformers are vitiated, and from which, instead of meeting them, too many Conservatives shrink in ignominious terror.

With regard to religion, philosophy, science, and the widespread ideas underlying what is vaguely described as Socialism, I have endeavored to discredit, or else to modify, the views which, for something like fifty years, leaders who are called "advanced" have been making more and more widely popular. I have resorted for this purpose to the methods of fiction and of formal argument. The implication of all the writings by which I have attempted to do this is that the mischief, religious, social, and political, which "advanced" thought has done may in time, by a rational development of conservative thought, be undone, and the true faiths be revived on which the sanct.i.ties, the stabilities, and the civilization of the social order depend.

I have nevertheless always myself recognized, ever since early enthusiasm felt the chill of experience, that such a counter-revolution must be slow, nor have I ever underrated the obstacles which certain false idealisms now at work in the world may oppose to it. On the contrary, I have always felt that no man is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and takes account, not only of what the adversary says, but also of the best that he _might say_, if only he had chanced to think of it.

On this principle I have endeavored myself to act. The process, however, may in some cases be not without the seeming danger that the converter, in thus arming himself for his task, may perform it somewhat too thoroughly, and end by being himself perverted. He must, at all events, go near to experiencing a sense of such perversion dramatically. Of this fact I have myself provided an example in one of my writings, to which I just now alluded, and which herein differs from the rest. Having elsewhere argued in defense of religious faith, as though feeling that, through argument and knowledge, mankind will some day recover it, I wrote the work here in question as a man might write who had himself made a final--even a complacent--surrender to the forces which he had dreamed of dissipating.

This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its form. I accordingly selected from his great scientific poem, which contains in embryo all the substance of the modern doctrine of evolution, those pa.s.sages which bear on the meaning of man's existence.

I arranged these in logical order, and translated or paraphrased them in the meter with which Fitzgerald has familiarized and fascinated the English ear, so that the philosophy of the Persian and the Roman might be reduced to something like a common denominator. Lucretius is so far a pessimist that, under existing conditions, human life is for him no more than a hideous nightmare; but he is so far an optimist that he looks upon all this misery as due to one removable cause, this cause being the prevalence of one mistaken belief, which a true scientific philosophy will altogether eradicate. The belief in question is a belief in a personal G.o.d, who is offended by the very nature of man, and who watches with a wrathful eye by the deathbed of each human creature, in order to begin a torture of him which will last for all eternity. Man's true savior, Lucretius argues, is science, which makes this belief ridiculous by showing clearly that all individual things--human beings included--are nothing but atomic aggregations, which, having been formed for a moment, dissolve and disappear for ever. How, then, can any avenging G.o.d be anything more than the distempered dream of children?

How could such a G.o.d torture men when they die, since as soon as they are dead there is nothing left to torture? Let them cast this incubus of irrational fear behind them, and the mere process of life may then be tolerable enough. It may even, in a sober way, be happy. It certainly need not be, as it now is, miserable; and at all events it will be pleasing as a prelude to the luxury of an endless sleep. Of my own rendering of the great Lucretian message, I may here give a few stanzas as specimens:

Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze Go off. Those mooned sands forsake their place; And where they are shall other seas in turn Mow with their sands of whiteness other bays.

How, then, the poet asks, shall the individual man be more enduring than these?

What, shall the dateless worlds in dust be blown Back to the unremembered and unknown, And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday-- Burn on forlorn, immortal and alone?

What though there lurks behind yon veil of sky Some fabled Maker, some immortal Spy, Ready to torture each poor thing he made?

Thou canst do more than G.o.d can. Thou canst die.

Will not the thunders of thy G.o.d be dumb When thou art deaf for ever? Can the sum Of all things bruise what is not? Nay, take heart, For where thou go'st thither no G.o.d can come.

And no omnipotent wearer of a crown Of righteousness, or fiend with branded frown Swart from the pit, shall break or reach thy rest, Or stir thy temples from the eternal down.

In writing this poem I experienced the full sensation of having become a convert to the Lucretian gospel myself, against which throughout my life it had been my dominant impulse to protest.

There are, doubtless, many others who experience this disconcerting vicissitude--for whom the deductions of science as a moral message are ludicrous, but for whom its homicidal negations prove in the end ineluctable. If this is their permanent, if this is their final condition, they will perhaps deserve commiseration, but they will hardly deserve castigation, for their att.i.tude is one which will bring its own castigation with it. I can only hope that I am ent.i.tled to the truly charitable satisfaction of regarding them as a cla.s.s to which I do not myself belong, and that the literary industry of a life otherwise idle may prove to be a form of action, or rather a reaction, which, alike as to religion and politics, will have not been unserviceable to the world.

To sum the matter up, the Lucretian philosophy of life, appealing as it may to men when in certain moods, is one which, when submitted to what Kant calls the "practical reason," shrivels up into an absurdity, and I have shown at length, in my work _The Reconstruction of Belief_, that this becomes only the more apparent when we consider the attempts which have been made by modern thinkers to vivify it by an idea of which in Lucretius there is no trace. Put into language less imposing than his own, the gospel of Lucretius virtually comes to this, that men may eat and drink and propagate their kind in comfort if only they will hold fast to the belief that men, when they die, slip into their burrows like rabbits, and will, though they have done with pleasure, be out of the reach of pain--that whatever they may have done or not done, they will all, as individuals, be as though they never had been. The only enlargement of this gospel which modern thought can suggest is rooted in a transference of men's serious interests in life from the life of the individual to the life of the community or the race, and in the thought that, though the individual perishes, the race will continue and progress.

The answer given to this argument in _The Reconstruction of Belief_ is that, even if we suppose such corporate progress to be a reality, it cannot be invested with any practical meaning unless we postulate the individual, and consider his fortunes first. We have here the a.s.ses'

Bridge of all philosophy whatsoever, and until the philosopher has crossed it the philosopher can do nothing but bray. The whole external universe, the race of men included, has for no man any perceptible existence except in so far as it is reflected in the thoughts and the sensations of the individual. The conception of the race is nothing, so far as we can know it, beyond what the individual conceives. Let us suppose it, then, to be in some relative sense true that the human race is undergoing some change always for the better in respect of its material or moral conditions, which change will continue so long as the race exists. In that case the course of Humanity will be comparable to an upward road which the race will be always ascending toward heights of welfare at present hardly imaginable. Such will be the course of the race, but the course of the individuals will be something totally different. It will for each be a progress not _up_ such a road, but _across_ it, no matter at what alt.i.tude this crossing is made. Humanity will always be nothing more than a procession pa.s.sing from one turnstile to another, the one leading out of, and the other leading into, a something which always must be, for each individual, a nullity. Apart from the individual, nothing which the human race knows as desirable can exist; and, logically and practically alike, the only efficient connection between the individual and the race must first of all be a connection not with the race as such, and not with external nature, but with something which is beyond both, and is not comprehended in either.

The only conceivable human being who will, apart from religion, ever be able to describe himself as coextensive with the human race will, as Nietzsche puts it in one of his most memorable sentences, be the last man left alive when the rest of the human race is frozen. He, and he only, will be able to say truly: "_h.o.m.o sum. Humani nihil a me alienum puto._"

[5] In connection with the above questions, I may mention certain others, all bearing on the relation of prose to poetry. It was said of Plutarch that his sense of sound was so delicate that if it had been necessary for the sake of mere verbal melody, he would have made Caesar kill Brutus instead of Brutus killing Caesar. Closely bearing on this criticism is the fact that in old English tragedies from the days of Dryden onward a careful reader will note that, while parts of the dialogue are in blank verse and parts in prose, the writers themselves show, in many cases, a very defective appreciation of where verse ends and prose begins, many pa.s.sages which are printed as prose being really unconscious verse. An interesting example of this may be found in a pa.s.sage from Bacon's _Essays_, which Macaulay quotes as an example of the literary alt.i.tude to which Bacon's prose could rise. This pa.s.sage is in reality blank verse pure and simple. It is as follows:

Virtue is like precious odors, Most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed.

Prosperity doth best discover vice.

Adversity doth best discover virtue.

This pa.s.sage, with Macaulay's comments on it, may be commended to the notice of those who contend that Bacon could not have written _Shakespeare_, because Bacon's acknowledged verses are of a very inferior kind. If they look in Bacon's prose for verse which was unacknowledged, and which was unintended by himself, they may find reason for modifying this argument.

THE END